While it’s nice to once again watch a new Doctor Who Christmas Special on actual Christmas, I will have to say that “Joy to the World” was a mixed bag leaning towards boring, at least in my opinion (which after all is what a review is, so I don’t know why I typed that…) It has some good ideas and some fun sequences but it was also capped off by the most Steven Moffat-y ending you could imagine, which at this point is somewhat nostalgic but still… Ah, enough waffling, let’s take a look!
The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) finds himself in a “Time Hotel” where people can book a room in a hotel in a different time period and arrive there via “that door in your hotel room that’s always locked and you never know what it is”. A fun concept though why The Doctor was delighted with the idea instead of outraged like he normally is with “time tourism” I don’t know. Anyway, as a distraction from his usual case of post-companion blues The Doctor notices someone with a case handcuffed to themselves so decides to track him out of curiosity, enlisting Hotel staff member Trev (Joel Fry) to help. As The Doctor explores the hotel Trev sees the briefcase get passed to someone else who then passes it to him which is a worry when the other two people disintegrate into glittery dust. Trev eventually passes the case onto a Silurian hotel manager (and then dies, obviously) and he brings it into a hotel room in 2024 currently occupied by Joy (Nicola Coughlan) who is understandably unnerved by the lizardman in her room.
The Doctor appears and tries to get information about the case from its new holder but Joy’s angry interference causes her to get the case instead. After the Silurian’s death The Doctor takes a peek inside to find out it’s essentially a star ready to be born but will need several million years to “cook” before it can be used, so they’re searching for a room significantly far in the past to do it, humanity be damned (literally!) The case then exclaims that the current holder will be killed unless an admin code gets punched in so a later version of The Doctor appears and tells his earlier self the code in a classic bootstrap paradox, only for the later Doctor to take Joy and tell his old self he’ll have to be him via the “long way round”. This led to the highlight segment of the episode as The Doctor decides to stay in the hotel for a year, when the next portal opens, and gets to know hotel manager Anita (Steph de Whalley) while living a pretty normal life. It was very… pleasant, and heart-warming in a way the rest of the story fell short of.
Due to making these screens ahead of time there isn’t actually any shots of Anita and my whole favourite part of the episode… Oh well, here’s the Silurian hotel manager instead! … Hooray?
The Doctor catches up with himself at last and then heads off following Joy, who is possessed by the briefcase and is searching for a door far enough back in time, soon finding one back in prehistoric days. As she arrives The Doctor manages to insult her for being in a sad lonely room at Christmas and how name is crap, eventually mentioning her mother driving Joy to give an impassioned speech about how her mother died on Christmas Day 2020 and thanks to COVID restrictions she could only talk to her via a video message and not even see her, all while the Torries partied together and broke their own rules. This timely political outburst was enough to break the hold the case had over her and allow it to drop harmlessly to the floor, a rather harsh but effective way to save her life on The Doctor’s part. It’s not all good news though as the case gets eaten by a T-Rex…
The story is an odd mix of ideas that feel separate and disjointed rather than make one satisfying story. Well acted as usual, and some typically great dialogue from “the Moff” but it just doesn’t come together in a satisfying way.
The Continuity:
If nothing else this shot gets across the idea of a Time Hotel pretty well!
The Star Seed, as its known but I don’t think I actually mentioned, is created by Villengard, the same weapons manufacturer as the mines in Moffat’s other Fifteenth Doctor story “Boom”. That’s it really, unless you count Joy’s ending being extremely similar to Clara and Bill’s, or you want me to name Silurian or dinosaur stories, but in terms of major links that’s your lot.
Overall Thoughts:
“Oh no, not again…” “What did you say, Joy?”
“Joy to the World” was … fine. I really enjoyed the bit in the middle with The Doctor leading a normal life and befriending the very normal (in an endearing way) Anita, but the two parts of the story either side were less interesting, especially the attempt at a “Hallmark” mushy tear-jerker plot and the ending was the third time Steven Moffat has given a companion an extremely similar ending, showing he hasn’t learnt his lesson from Russel T. Davies’ jab at it during the Toymaker’s “Well that’s alright then!” scene last year. A mixed bag rather than bad, but I doubt I’ll ever want to watch it again.
The Doctor and Joy manage to escape the T-Rex and back in the Time Hotel they get a message from Trev, who through the magic of techno-babble is able to talk to them through the sonic screwdriver from within the star, as apparently people weren’t being killed but absorbed instead. He reveals that the case eventually found its way into a specific shrine and that the millions of years needed have been achieved so its only minutes away from detonation. As The Doctor heads through several doors to get the right equipment Joy opens the case and communes with the people inside, and by the time our protagonist Time Lord arrives back she has already absorbed the star into herself, um, somehow.
This looked cool in the preview trailers, in actuality it was a small part of his search through the many time doors. Still a fun scene though…
She thanks The Doctor before flying off into the deep space to safely detonate, creating the Star of Bethlehem for the record as the case was in a cave in the year 1AD (ho-ho!) The Doctor is surprisingly okay with another companion being killed-but-sort-of-not (in the classic “well that’s okay then!” Moffat way) and talks about how Joy has brought joy to the world (by shining brightly at Christmas, I guess…?) while we see the star in the sky at several points, including 2020 where Joy’s mother takes her previously mentioned final video call with her daughter before she somehow gets absorbed into the distant star to be with her daughter forever…? Not sure how, but it’s Christmas, so why not?
Hogan Reviews 